


there's a sea secret in me

by metonymy



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Gen, Sea Monsters, vengeance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-25
Updated: 2013-09-25
Packaged: 2017-12-27 13:47:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/979646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metonymy/pseuds/metonymy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one knows where she came from or who she really is. Some say she walked out of the sea. But she's appeared a month after the king's wife fell from the highest tower into the sea. And she has the strangest eyes. Written for Inception Reverse Bang 2013.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there's a sea secret in me

**1\. the maiden**

Nobody knows where the girl came from.

A shipwreck, some say, claiming she washed ashore on a spar of driftwood in sodden finery and gasping with tears, unable to speak for a year because of the horrors she had seen.

A wanderer, others say, a girl who sailed a tiny raft into a cove and strode boldly up the shoreline in foreign garb, unable to speak because she did not know this land's language.

A mermaid, they whisper, a siren, a naiad who walked out of the water clad in nothing but her own streaming hair and ropes of pearls and seaweed, unable to speak because she knew nothing of the human tongue.

No one knows for certain except the girl and the old man who took her in when she first appeared near his home at the furthest part of the land. Perhaps he named her Ariadne, a name that rolled off the tongue like music, unfamiliar and old-fashioned and strange. Perhaps she named herself. Perhaps it was a name she'd always borne. 

Neither of them say anything about it, and she becomes a part of the scenery, at the old man's side as he wanders the streets of the city. She is simply there now, a part of their city like the walls and the waves and the crumbling tower where no one goes.

Ariadne, with her hair curling like the waves, her teeth like shells flashing at the bottom of the water when she laughs or smiles. She does that frequently, though no one knows why. They certainly don't see anything to laugh at. Ariadne with her skin gleaming like a pearl, never growing red or brown under the sun and in the wind, no matter how many hours she spends perched on the rock out on the headland watching the waves. Ariadne who rarely speaks but seems to listen like the empty ocean. 

Of course, they whisper other things about her too. How could they not? A strange girl appears alone, coming to their city without husband or brother or father, without gold in her pocket or a tale on her lips. 

A girl appears a month after the king's wife falls from the highest tower into the sea.

A girl who laughs at the wrong times and has a face inscrutable as the moon.

Of course they whisper about her. 

But no one speaks openly against her. Not yet. 

Not when the king's most trusted advisor has taken the girl in and adopted her.

A charm in his old age, he says, and now that he has retired to the cottage by the sea the old artificer is perhaps allowed a little eccentricity. His wisdom is still valued, the words of the old man bringing caution and care in equal measure. Even after his daughter fell and he had to leave the castle, where the memories were too great.

(Even after his daughter fell. Even after his daughter threw herself, some say, whispers carried on the wind.)

If the old man says he trusts the girl, then the king must trust her. And if the king must trust her, then the city must follow. 

But that never stops the whispers. 

 

**2\. the sailor**

One of the merchant sailors comes down to the point one day, making enough noise that she can hear him stepping over the pebbles and broken shells. "Are you watching for ships?" he asks, in a friendly sort of voice. 

Ariadne turns to look at him, broad-shouldered and broad-grinned, and did not scream or run or greet him. He sees her eyeing the markings running over his skin and kneels next to her, rolling up one of his sleeves even further. 

"Tattoos," he tells her, baring his arm. "They do it with a needle and ink. Do they have them where you come from?" 

She traces over the whorls and lines with a delicate finger, cold against his skin even at midday. An anchor, a charm against bad luck, a pattern around his bicep that bunches and stretches as he moves his arm. A mermaid on his forearm, her scaly tail seeming to dance when he turns his hand this way and that. Ariadne laughs, her finger skidding over the drawing and landing on the miniature face and waving hair.

"Who was she?" she asks, and her voice is not musical or low and cooing or bewitching at all. Just a girl's voice, a little rough, the vowels strange in her mouth. 

"Hm?" He looks up at Ariadne and is momentarily transfixed. How is there that light in her eyes even on a cloudy morning? What is it in her that catches him like a fish hook embedded beneath his breastbone? 

"No one," he says, tongue thick and dry suddenly. "Just a face."

"She looks familiar," she says. "Those eyes." Dark eyes, not like hers. Like the queen's. Forever inked in his skin, since the day he first saw that face against the bright sky and sea.

Her finger feels like a brand against his skin. The mermaid's face is no longer a coy smile. It seems to be baring its teeth in fury or madness.

Ariadne pulls back her hand. 

He finds himself back in his chamber aboard the ship, staring into the smudgy square that passes for a mirror, unable to stop running his hands over his tattoos. The mermaid smiles again, and on his shoulder the Mother keeps her calm, but he can't stop looking for a hint of a change. 

 

**3\. the alchemist**

He comes down from the city often, the alchemist. He's a healer as well as a scientist, and he uses various local plants - tinctures, salves, tisanes, poultices, anything that might serve to soothe or heal or distract. The pains of a life lived in a body made of flesh and bone. It earns his daily bread and the king doesn't seem to mind the smells and smoke of the alchemist's other experiments.

So he comes down at odd hours to collect the weeds and flowers and leaves, a basket over one arm like a woman going to market, a small knife in his other hand. He knows what will have to be dried in bunches, perfuming the air of his chambers, and what will be preserved in oil. 

"What are you doing?"

He is pulling up a flower for its roots when he hears the voice, and whirls with the knife in his hand before he knows who has spoken.

It's the girl, her face nearly as pale as the gray stone of the cliff behind her, far too close to the point of his blade.

He sighs and puts it away hastily so as not to slip and cut her. "Gathering plants. For medicine." He's not sure how much she understands. "When people are sick, to make them better." 

"Or make them sick," she says. "Or make them dream, or die."

He nearly drops the knife. How could she possibly know what else he would have in his laboratory? Not that he uses it. He never uses it. He only gave it to the queen because she said she could not sleep

He didn't think she knew that many words, this strange girl.

"Not these plants," he says finally. "These roots, they draw out infection when steeped in alcohol. When a wound rots from the inside."

She leans closer and sniffs audibly, nose wrinkling at the scent of the soil and the naked roots and the flower in its dying spasms. It looks utterly normal on her face, making her look like any other young girl who might wander by.

"The moss down by the water," she says, straightening up. "If you pack a wound with it, it heals faster." 

"I know," he says. "But only when it's fresh. If it dries out it's not as good."

Ariadne's brows draw together in a straight line, as if she's never heard of such a thing. He puts the plant in his basket, tangled roots and soil and all, and when he looks back up she is walking away. Her feet make no sound.

In his laboratory he searches under a floorboard for a key, and moves aside a shelf full of bottles to find a door, and opens the door to a secret cabinet.

The cabinet is empty.

 

**4\. the captain of the guard**

He patrols the castle.

He doesn't need to anymore, not as the captain of the guard; by rights he should be setting a schedule for his men to keep watch and finding other more important duties for himself. But he never takes himself off the rotation, working twice as hard and twice as long to protect the man who was his friend and is now the king.

Is still his friend, he would say, to anyone who asked. But no one asks, because no one approaches the captain of the guard. Why would they? The city is safe, the castle is safe, and his protection is only minimally needed. No one would dare hurt their king. 

The king never comes up to the battlements, and the small staff of the castle has no reason to go up there either. So the captain is used to solitude and what passes for silence in a city on the sea - the waves and the wind a reassuring susurrus that fades into the back of his mind, the cries of the sea birds familiar and untroubling. 

It is a shock, then, when he sees the small figure at the other side of the wall. She does not move as he approaches, though his steps are solid and sure on the stones. She is looking at the ruined tower, the one furthest out on the land, where no one goes. 

"When did it fall?" she asks, not turning to look at him. The cliff sheers away under its bulk, the rocks waiting below where the waves crash and recede and crash again. 

"Years and years ago," he says, leaning his spear against his shoulder. Her hair blows in the wind, whipping the air as it flies away from her face like a flag. Her eyes are wide even in the bright light of the afternoon. "They say the waves on the cliff made it unsound. That was why it fell." The tower rises to a considerable height still, but the top of the tower is long gone, its stones collapsed inward, the staircases unsafe. 

"But it's still there," Ariadne says, her voice perfectly clear in spite of the wind. Her profile is like something carved out of the rock by the waves, the sharp edges rounded down to gentle curves, but there is still nothing soft or safe about her. "Why wasn't it torn down?"

"Tradition, mostly. It's still a part of the castle. We can't just destroy everything the old kings did." He thinks of the last king, the one who ruled before his friend took power, the one who was the last of an old line and still bright and innocent in many ways. He thinks Ariadne would have liked that king better. But then the captain of the guard would not be the captain, just another sellsword roaming the islands and the waves and the mainland. 

"It's part of what you guard?" He'd forgotten for a moment that she was still there, and now she's looking at him. Those eyes are arresting, unsettling, like beads of electrum catching the light. 

"Of course. Though our paths rarely take us there. Just to the wall that leads up to it."

Ariadne turns away again, leans over the battlement. The stones here are rough and thick and should keep her safe, but he wants to catch at the back of her dress anyway, to pull her back and hold her close and keep her far from any fall.

"If someone went up there you might not see them," she says, the words almost slurring as she says them slowly, quietly. "If they didn't want to be seen." 

"We are only men," he says, his own voice pitched only for her own ears. "We make mistakes."

She turns to him and her gaze seems to flay him to the bone. "You made mistakes," she said. 

He bows to her and continues on his rounds. 

That night he lies awake and sees Ariadne's eyes and hears, over and again, a phantom cry from the ruined tower. He does not sleep.

 

**5\. the king**

Today is not an audience day. The king sits in his throne anyway. He likes to come there to think. To rest secure with no demands on his time or his thoughts, no challenges to his decrees. To simply know who he is and where he belongs. He finds the high ceiling and wide hall calming, a world of space and light bounded by his power and reassuringly stable.

"My lord." 

The voice is coming from behind the throne; whoever speaks must have used his entrance rather than the main door. No one is supposed to use that door except himself and the guards that accompany him, but today he had told the guards to wait outside while he sat in peace. 

"Who's there? Show yourself," he demands. There is no sound of footsteps, but soon a figure appears in his periphery. The girl, Ariadne, the one who came out of the ocean. She is barefoot, as ever. She makes no sound on the smooth stone floor.

"What are you doing here?" he asks, eyes narrowing to see her against the light. The wide windows, high on the wall, pour light into the chamber this time of day. Her hair is a halo around her head, wild and unkempt, like the branches of a tree. Or like a tangle of seaweed.

"I came to see you," she says. "To see what you do here, in your kingdom." Not just why she came here today, then. But he still has no idea what that means, where she came from, why she needed to see.

"What do you want?" he asks. His voice catches in his throat and he coughs.

"I know," she says, and the king feels fear. True fear, that cold sickening sensation that his guts have fallen out onto the floor and the creeping tentacles spread up through his chest and around his heart. 

"I know Mal was never your advisor's daughter. He was the one who took her in when the sailors caught her, who taught her how to walk and how to speak and how to help him in his work."

Ariadne walks closer to him, her gaze steadfast even as she leaves footprints behind her on the floor that are dark and gleaming. He can smell iron and salt. He rises out of his seat, taking a step towards her as if to do... something. Strike her. Throttle her. Throw her out the window.

"You're a witch," he says, feeling frantic. She is a tiny slip of a girl, a minnow in the shallows. How can she be dangerous?

"I know she saw how you ruled and tried to change your mind, and how you stopped listening to her and to the old man." Her feet are silent on the flagstones still, even as she circles closer to his throne. No one ever comes here unshod. It would be disrespectful.

"You know nothing. He's lying." His advisor hated lying for him, hated even keeping silent in the face of questioning, but he'd done it to preserve the peace. To give the king what he wanted.

"I know you gave her the potions to make her sleep, to confuse her. To keep her quiet and docile. But she wasn't, was she? They drove her mad." Her eyes are full of emotion. And tears. 

"I gave her wine, that was all," he says. "It was the alchemist." He watched to find the alchemist's secret trove and took what he thought he needed. He dosed the wine and gave it to his wife, still trusting in spite of what she'd seen. He saw those bright eyes grow clouded and strange. 

"She wasn't trying to kill herself, when she jumped. She was trying to get back to the sea." Tears spill down the girl's face, tracks of water salt water running down to her chin. But she doesn't look sad. She looks furious. "If she'd missed the rocks she would still be alive. And home."

"You know nothing at all," he says, backing into the throne and sitting down. How can such a small woman tower over him like this? Is it simply the burning gaze of her eyes? 

How can she know all this?

"She was only trying to go home," Ariadne says, her voice ringing in his ears.

He calls for the guards. They rush in and the captain takes her by the arm and her skin bruises, not cold marble after all. 

The king knows what he has to do.

 

**6\. the old man**

There is no trial. Monsters who threaten the life of the king deserve no trial, no judgement, no saving grace. She will be thrown into the sea as a sacrifice to the forces that trouble their land and stole their queen. The king has decreed it, and no one dares to speak against him.

There is a little time, before the moon is full and the tides are at their highest. Until then the girl waits in a cell beneath the palace.

The guards refuse to watch her. She doesn't eat, they say, and never sleeps at night. She sings. They cannot bear to hear her singing.

When the old man goes to the prison, he feels the weight of the castle and the rock beneath it pressing down, an unimaginable mass that makes his shoulders stoop even further. Bad judgement on the part of the builders, he thinks. Should've made the ceilings higher.

He hears no singing as he approaches her cell. Only the distant booming of the waves against the cliffs.

The captain of the guard is leaving the cell just as the old man approaches. They nod at each other. There are bruises purple as grapes beneath the captain's eyes, as if he hasn't slept in weeks. He looks back into the cell and shakes his head, saying something low that gets lost in the echoes of the caverns and the dull sound of the waves.

Ariadne looks up as the old man enters and her smile is a flash of brightness in that dim room. She is pale and thin, even thinner than before, and her dress is grimy. But she sits straight and her eyes are undimmed, flashing even now with that spark he loved when she first walked out of the waves.

"I am sorry, my dear," he says, sitting on a jut of rock that serves for a stool, gathering his fraying robes about his feet. It is cold and damp down here, and she finally seems to feel it. But the witch-monster has received no blankets, no comforts. "I tried to stop him, so long ago. I never thought it would come to this."

"It's all right," she says, her voice soothing and gentle, as if she is the one who has come to comfort him. "I found what I needed to. It will all be over soon."

He cries then, a little ashamed, knowing he was sending another girl to her death. So many sacrifices on the altar of the king's selfishness and ignorance. So little he can do.

Ariadne strokes his thin white hair. "Do not cry, sir. It will be well." 

 

**7\. the monster**

Ariadne always knew she would return to the sea. The magic that brought her here was not powerful enough to transform her longing, her knowledge of her true home. It gave her the land, but no more than that. It did not change what she truly was.

It had not been able to change Mal. 

She stands on the rocky headland once more, but this time she is bound by chains. Silver, and worked with small symbols and markings through the links. The alchemist's work, or at least his recommendation, she knows. The guards circle her at a safe distance, spears out. The captain is first among them, his jaw set and spear steady but a look of sick horror in his eyes.

The king is saying something, grand words dressing up the ugly fact that he is sending a girl to her death. Like jewels on the hilt of a dagger; make them as pretty as you like, the intent is still to cut and tear and kill. The people before him look unhappy, a movement in the crowd like the shudder of muscles under skin bunching before a powerful convulsion. Before a strike. 

The king turns back to her, blue eyes unseeing as the hollow sky above. The waves crash behind her. 

She turns to look at the waves, taking a careful step and then another. A rock slices her foot and the blood begins to flow. Let it fall. It will all be over soon.

The king says something. It is an awfully long way down.

There is a prick, a push at her back, and she squirms away in shock more than pain and begins to fall. She screams, the words torn from her throat and turning into pure sound. The air is not her element and she wishes she had her hands over her head and this is going to hurt and she wriggles and twists and she is going to hit the rocks and

[](https://68.media.tumblr.com/a16ef19793cc13c706fb53db86330a0e/tumblr_otm6xiy0X51qzuc78o1_540.jpg)

she hits the water feet-first. 

The chains dissolve around her like foam on the waves.

Ariadne sucks in water and screams again, forming the words this time. They bubble out through the water, the fluid feeling strangely heavy around her after weeks on dry land. 

There is a great movement in the water. She kicks and swims and pulls herself up on a tiny promontory just below the water to watch.

The beast rises out of the depths behind her.

It is massive, truly, larger than anything on land. It is covered in shining gray-green scales, writhing and twisting around itself. It has great hungry eyes and sharp teeth.

She can see, up on the cliff, the people scattering. The guards throw down their spears and pray.

The king stands alone, a tiny figure, and raises his arms. As if he knows what is coming.

Ariadne watches the whole while, the waves lapping around her, the wind tangling her hair. 

She has done what she came here to do. Now she can go home.

 

**8\. the sea**

The old man sits before his cottage once more, watching the waves as he does every day. The day is quiet again; the monster has slipped back beneath the waves, leaving little more than a dark stain on the rocks. No one is wailing for the lost king. Not today.

Ariadne is gone too; she returned to the water, her home. Her element, changeable and mutable and always finding a way. He thinks he saw her wave, just once, before she dove beneath a cresting swell. But he could be wrong.

He sits there all day and through the evening, watching the waves pound on the shore, watching the moon come into the sky. The captain of the guard turns up, exhausted, clothes still stained rusty brown, and begs for his help. There is no order of succession, he says, and he himself cannot be king. Could the old man take the crown? Or at least offer his help?

"Let it go," says the old man. "Let the whole castle fall. Let the sea take it."

It is, he thinks, what Ariadne would have wanted.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to @shiroi_tenshi for her spectacular and inspiring [art](http://shiroi-ten.livejournal.com/25269.html); it was a joy to write for, and this story absolutely took over my brain. And as ever, thanks to @alierakieron for beta-ing and encouragement along the way.


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